History
Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte, who was competing with her best friend and sister to see who could generate the most traffic, designed the Hampster Dance in August 1998 as homage to her pet hamster, named "Hampton Hamster." Using four simple animated GIFs of hamsters and other rodents, repeated dozens of times each, and a loop of background music embedded in the HTML, at the time a fairly new browser feature, she named the site Hampton's Hamster House and had Hampton declare his intent to become a "web star". Initially, the website consisted of a single page with four hamsters and other rodents, later redesigned and dubbed Hampton, Dixie, Hado, and Fuzzy. Over the next few years, alternate versions of the Hampsterdance appeared, such as for birthdays, where the hamsters are slightly modified to hold presents.
The clip, a 9-second looped WAV file, was taken from a sped-up recording of Roger Miller's "Whistle Stop", a song written for the 1973 Walt Disney cartoon Robin Hood.
Until January 1999, only 800 visits were recorded (about 4 per day), but without warning, the number jumped to 15,000 per day. The web site spread by e-mail, early blogs, and bumper stickers, and was eventually even featured in a television commercial for Internet service provider EarthLink. It became a common office prank to set a co-worker's browser homepage to the website, which led to televised news reports furthering popularity to an international level. The continued popularity of the site led LaCarte to a professional redesign, and the addition of an online store for T-shirts and CDs of "Hamster" music.
LaCarte failed to register the Hampsterdance name, and for some time the hamsterdance.com domain was owned by humor business Nutty Sites. Initially, hampsterdance.com was used, and later hamsterdance2.com. Fans of the site created variations on the original dance, using politicians such as Dan Quayle and Cynthia McKinney as well as household objects such as Pez dispensers and lung X-rays.
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